RIM Stokes BlackBerry Tablet Rumors with BlackPad.com

I can’t imagine that Research in Motion (RIM), makers of the venerable BlackBerry smartphone, would name a tablet the BlackPad but, hey, just about everyone and their mother railed against the “iPad” name at first.

Whatever the case, the Waterloo, Ontario company recently purchased the domain BlackPad.com, as evidenced in a WHOIS lookup that an eagle-eyed reader (or one with plenty of time to kill) sent in to MobileCrunch.

Rumors of a BlackBerry Tablet have been floating around for a while now, with a June 15th piece in the Wall Street Journal adding an extra layer of legitimacy to the whole ordeal.

Reports indicate that this BlackBerry tablet—aw, hell, let’s just call it the BlackPad—may have a 7- to 9-inch screen and connect to the internet by way of an actual BlackBerry smartphone. Some reports from earlier this year even seemed to indicate that the screen would be black and white, though that could have been an unrelated Kindle competitor prototype.

I would hope, for RIM’s sake, that this BlackPad would have at least a Wi-Fi connection (a color screen would be nice, too) that allowed it to connect to wireless networks without a BlackBerry phone acting as an intermediary, then would use a BlackBerry handset to connect to cellular networks on the road.

That might make sense in the interest of keeping the overall price of the device down and it’d certainly make wireless carriers happy: “Oh, you want to use your BlackBerry’s data connection on a slightly larger screen? That’ll be an extra $20 per month tethering fee, thank you very much.”